Artificial Intelligence in Pharmacy: Revolutionizing Drug Dispensing and Patient Safety

Abstract

In this article, the role of robotics in pharmacy, which uses artificial intelligence to assist in the dispensing of medications, will be reviewed. The advancements of pharmacy robots in regard to vial medication dispensing and blister medication dispensing will be discussed. An overview of currently available pharmacy robots will be provided, and insight into the future of pharmacy robots will be shared.

821,000 people die annually worldwide due to medication errors. About 22.5% of these deaths can be prevented by barcoding patients near the point of care or by the double-checking principle. American hospitals spend approximately $0.56 million annually for additional verification time, impulse buying, inaccurate design, seniority, and high cost for familiarization. 91% of patients with tamper-resistant prescription pads experienced one or more tampering incidents. Thus, the need to remediate a complexity issue in pharmacy robotics is of paramount importance. This remediation can be accomplished by a new generation of pharmacy robotics that utilizes multi-core computing systems for parallel processing of both probabilistic and deterministic tasks of pharmacy robotics systems.

115,374 medication errors occur nationally each day, resulting in 1,042 patients with serious injury. Personal digital assistants collect excessive data relevant to a patient’s medications and health issues. Personal digital assistants have not lived up to expectations, and various systems have experienced technical problems. The need for a single integrated IT system and communication mechanism remains unmet despite the recent convergence of several disparate technologies. Patients prefer a single point of product initialization; however, unaddressed are physical formats which should be compatible, performant, compact, and robust for different environments. For home use, it is important that systems be autonomous and unaware of the user’s current or past experience. Solutions to these complexity issues that plague pharmacy robotics systems less depend on newly developed multiple standards as heavy machinery does but more on a new science of robotics.